Page Tools

Related

One woman caught in the net illustrates how desperately the
Immigration Department needs cultural change, writes David Marr.

PART TWO

FROM BAXTER TO FREEDOM

BAXTER sits in the scrub 10 kilometres outside Port Augusta. Such a hostile, distant setting is a deliberate part of this country's deterrence policy. Having this place out in the wilds sends a message to the world - and to the electorate - that life can be very harsh if you tangle with Australia's immigration system.

Mick Palmer, in his report published last week, wrote that the facilities at Baxter are modelled on prison facilities and the operating regime is based on prison norms. Most of the guards have worked in prisons: "There is an enduring tension between containment and care, and the emphasis at Baxter is on containment."

Anna Brotmeyer - or Anna Schmidt as she sometimes called herself - was in trouble within a week of her arrival at Baxter on October 6 last year. After six months in a Brisbane prison and seven months without medication for schizophrenia, Anna paced and stared. Her moods swung erratically. She stole food. She would strip off and wander half-naked around the centre.

On October 15, she was separated from the women and families and punished by being placed in Red One compound - only it's not called punishment at Baxter but "behaviour modification".

The rackety Anna was the only one anyone at Baxter knew. "Regrettably this abnormal behaviour was treated as normal for Anna," writes Palmer. There were rumours she had lived for a time with Aborigines in the far north of Queensland. Palmer heard of guards who believed her behaviour in Baxter was consistent "with someone who had been involved with drugs or had suffered brain damage as a result of sniffing petrol".

The centre's psychologist had a more sophisticated diagnosis: he put Anna's problem down to a severe "personality disorder" which compelled her "to push the boundaries in order to draw others toward her on a constant basis".

Such disorders aren't treated but disciplined. It was the day after this assessment that Anna was taken out of the compound for women and families and placed with the other difficult cases in Red One. She would live there for all but a few days of her time in Baxter. Anna was the only woman in the compound.

After six months of inept and desultory investigation, the department still had no idea who this woman was and had found not a shred of evidence to back her story that she was a German backpacker who had overstayed her visa. She had been in Red One about a week when an immigration officer asked her directly: "Are you Australian?" Anna gave a blank stare and made no reply.

One initiative by the Immigration Department could have solved the Anna mystery at a stroke: all it had to do was publish her photograph. Palmer wrote: "The inquiry is convinced that, had Anna's photograph been more widely published early in her detention and as soon as the difficulties with identifying her were becoming apparent, she would have been identified."

NSW police had her photograph. So did the German consulate in Sydney. It hung in the foyer there throughout this saga. There were any number of Australians who would recognise this strikingly beautiful, fit young woman if her picture ever appeared in the papers. But an old taboo constrained the department - the taboo against publishing "humanising" images of detainees.

Palmer doesn't use that language. He talks of a misplaced concern for privacy and a lack "openness and transparency", which he sees as yet further evidence of the department's dysfunctional culture. Immigration would supply a picture to the NSW police in the last hours of Anna's ordeal - and that would do the trick - but this simple solution never occurred to immigration bureaucrats as the mystery of Anna deepened.

ANNA'S life in Red One was run according to "rigid, step-by-step protocols" designed in Canberra by the Immigration Department and imposed as an inflexible disciplinary regime in Baxter. The staff on the ground had long been trying to persuade Immigration to reform these rules but Palmer reports: "The speed of response from Canberra to urgent operational concerns was described as 'glacial'."

Like all cases at Baxter, Anna's was managed from far away Canberra. Her fate in Baxter was exactly as head office ordered. The management she experienced - "disjointed, fragmented and poorly co-ordinated" says Palmer - was not exceptional. A fundamental conclusion of Palmer's report is that detainees suffered "not so much incompetent management but an absence of management". No one was managing the managers. "Nobody was in charge."

Files were building up everywhere on the mysterious German woman at Baxter, but no one had a bird's eye view of the case. Palmer found record-keeping systems in the department were "seriously flawed" and it was difficult even for him to pull together all the Anna material. "Relevant documents were kept in several different locations and as both hard-copy files and computer records." As a consequence, "nobody was gathering and collating the results of individual search activities".

Palmer blames this mess for the failure, about six weeks after Anna's arrival at Baxter, to direct the search for her identity down the right track. An officer at the centre concluded "Anna was an Australian national of German parents" and he recommended the department check with missing persons and the Australian Federal Police. Palmer writes: "This was communicated to staff in Baxter and Canberra but does not seem to have prompted any action."

This was in late November and by this time Anna's behaviour had again deteriorated and she was enduring her second spell in Baxter's dreaded Management Unit. This is an inner compound of Red One that Palmer says is designed "to contain disruptive or self-harming behaviour".

The 10 rooms are bare and under continuous video surveillance with a minimum of privacy. Palmer found "no evidence of improper behaviour by detention officers" towards Anna while she was in the Management Unit. Yet he is far from convinced such a unit is appropriate for immigration detainees: "It is difficult in this environment to demonstrate that the purpose is not punitive."

ANNA announced she was desperate to spend a white Christmas at home in Dresden. An immigration officer came to help her fill in yet another application for a German passport. But it was the same story as before. A departmental chronology given to Senator Joe Ludwig records: "The application was not submitted to the German authorities as Anna Brotmeyer aka Schmidt stated she could not provide any documents of identification."

She had no documents, several dates of birth, no names for her parents, no coherent account of her upbringing or how she arrived in Australia and not a single soul in Germany who could vouch for her - yet the Immigration Department was convinced she was a German tourist.

By early December, the German consulate in Melbourne was co-ordinating fresh inquiries in Germany. Consulate staff wanted fingerprints. Anna refused. They wanted a photograph and the department provided one. As the Germans reported failure after failure through December and January, the Immigration Department kept urging them to try again. After a phone call to the consulate from Anna, the vice-consul rang her case officer to say: "Anna might be an Australian citizen of German parents." The clue was ignored.

While immigration officers inquired of government departments around Australia - including some missing persons databases - Australian diplomats had been put on the job of trying to track down likely Schmidts and Brotmeyers in Warsaw, Moscow, Kiev and Prague. All these inquiries failed.

In late January, the Germans finally dug in their heels, telling the department: "Our hands are tied, since by international law the German consulate-general in Melbourne has no authority any more to continue activities in this matter." But they saw bigger issues looming here.

For almost two months refugee advocates had been ringing the consulate to lobby on behalf of the mad "German" in Baxter who was receiving no medical treatment. The then ambassador, Dr Klaus-Peter Klaiber, told the Herald these complaints were taken seriously. "The NGOs claimed there were human right issues at stake and we informed [the Immigration Department] accordingly."

PUTTING jails in remote places has always made citizens feel safer. But the drawbacks are so brutal for prisoners and their guards that after a couple of centuries of debate it's now widely agreed that the best place for prisons is in cities. That was not the thinking behind Baxter. This was an old-fashioned exercise in deterrence by geography. Detainees might not like it but most Australians do.

Yet the drawbacks remain. Palmer notes that unlike Villawood in Sydney and Maribyrnong in Melbourne, "Baxter does not have immediate access to 'big city' services. Port Augusta has 15,000 inhabitants; Adelaide is 300 kilometres away."

Port Augusta has no psychiatrist.

Palmer was extremely critical of arrangements for providing medical services to detainees. He found the contract between the department and the company that manages the centre - Global Solutions Limited Australia, known as GSL - failed to set "measurable standards".

Further confusing the situation were GSL's arrangements with local GPs, the South Australian Rural and Remote Mental Health Service - and a consulting psychiatrist, Dr Andrew Frukacz, who flew from NSW every month or so to visit Baxter.

Messy as all that is, Palmer was adamant that ultimate responsibility for the health of the detainees remained where it always had - with the Department of Immigration.

Frukacz saw Anna a month after her arrival in Baxter. He sensed immediately what might be wrong. "Diagnosis unclear but possibilities include: 1. Schizophrenia 2. Personality disorder. Her posturings, bizarre behaviours and guardedness lead me to consider schizophrenia." He recommended she be taken to Glenside Psychiatric Hospital in Adelaide to be assessed. He did not commit her nor did he speak directly with psychiatrists there. Frukacz flew out and did not see Anna again.

As her behaviour deteriorated in the months ahead the staff at Baxter negotiated in a leisurely fashion with the staff at Glenside to get her to Adelaide.

Palmer admits to being unable to decide between "the differing perspectives" of the two sides. But what he called "the clinical pathways" were clearly not working here. "The situation is typical of the lack of leadership and acceptance of responsibility the inquiry found on a number of occasions."

Anna was refusing to co-operate. She would have to be detained under the South Australian Mental Health Act to be taken to Adelaide. The pressure on Glenside was already acute. As Palmer remarks, patients from Baxter brought with them "the disruptive presence on the ward of escorting officers" and these patients tended to be very sick and stay a long time. Two arrived at the end of December which set back Anna's chances. Palmer wrote: "Staff at Glenside had a preference that only one Baxter patient should be admitted at a time."

All the way through January, doctors talked to one another but Anna stayed exactly where she was in Red One. "Everyone saw themselves as 'only a bit player'; no one was managing the process," writes Palmer. "The defined clinical pathways did not work effectively. The 'system' failed. As far as delivering quality care is concerned, her identity and immigration status would have been irrelevant. She was simply a person who needed help." Palmer would conclude: "The mental health care delivered at Baxter is inadequate by any standards."

Now three months without seeing a psychiatrist and nearly 10 months without medication, she was sicker than ever - withdrawn, often screaming, stripping off clothes, laughing hysterically, sometimes just staring for hours. She would make strange, almost silent phone calls to say: "This is not a nice place."

DESPITE having no power and little time, Mick Palmer and his team have produced a report which could change the face of immigration detention. But there are gaps. The worst is his failure to address the culpability of Amanda Vanstone and her office. This was her department. She sat above this culture. She was not questioned. This is a report written for her, not about her.

And her office was directly involved in the scandal, certainly for the last month of Anna's torture in Baxter. Vanstone told Senate estimates earlier this year: "It was early in January that my office was first made aware of this case."

The same refugee advocates lobbying the German consulate were also lobbying her office. Whether they had an impact, Palmer doesn't report but he credits them with generating the "advocacy driven publicity" that finally succeeded where the department's worldwide searches had failed.

It was so simple in the end. On February 3, Edgar and Veronika Rau read a story in this paper about a mysterious "Anna" at Baxter who might be German and clearly needed psychiatric care. They guessed this was their daughter. They alerted the police, who asked Baxter for a photograph. It was Cornelia. By chance the medicos had finally got their act together that afternoon and were about to remove Cornelia to Adelaide. By the time she was ambushed under the showers that evening, she was no longer a detainee. Police and ambulance officers took her about 11 pm to Port Augusta hospital. Next day she was in Glenside.

Since the publication of Palmer's report, attempts have been made to blame the scandal he has uncovered - not just the scandal of Cornelia Rau but also the deportation of Vivian Alvarez Solon and the 200 further cases of possible wrongful detention yet to be investigated by the Ombudsman - on the lower rungs of the Immigration Department.

This is emphatically not Palmer's verdict. He calls this a "strongly hierarchical" department with "a high degree of vertical control" and the rigid culture of habit, denial and self-justification he uncovered was not "confined to operational levels but were pervasive at senior executive management level". He sheets responsibility home to the very top.

Such organisations do not grow by accident. By and large Australians have been happy with this cruel and dysfunctional department guarding our borders. It's a system that's developed under two governments. For Howard, in particular, it's been a winner - until it swept into its maw Rau. She was not an Afghan or a Thai sex slave. She was one of us.

Perhaps Vanstone and Howard are sincere when they say they accept "the thrust" of Palmer recommendations for root and branch reform. Perhaps. No minister or bureaucrat has suffered because of Palmer's revelations. And Howard, who reads this country so well, must wonder if Australia is ready, even now, for an immigration system with a human face.

THE PALMER VERDICT

Processes failed. It was not a failure of instructions … the instructions were not followed. It was a serious failure of management process and corporate oversight.

Everyone saw themselves as "only a bit player"; no one was managing the process. The defined clinical pathways did not work effectively. The "system" failed Cornelia Rau.The mental health care delivered at Baxter is inadequate by any standards.

A culture that ignores criticism and is unduly defensive, process motivated and unwilling to question itself.Reform must come from the top. Executive management must demonstrate consistent commitment to establishing new values and perspectives. These will guide the new way of doing business.